8 Tips to Boost Your Creativity

In our professional life as in our personal life, we value creativity to improve ourselves. The ideas that women have can be brilliant, and need to be developed. But sometimes it doesn’t come easily, so here are a few tips to guide you in your creative process.

1. Pay attention and note every idea that you have during the day: you can write on your smart-phone or in a notebook every word or image that comes to your mind. It can be used and developed later.

2. Do nothing and rest your mind: sometimes over-thinking doesn’t lead anywhere. Alan Cohen once wrote, "There is virtue in work and there is virtue in rest. Use both and overlook neither.” Take your time and do other activities to relax your mind.

3. Challenge yourself into doing new things you are not used to: take a different path to go to work, try a new sport or instrument, eat a new kind of food, give yourself challenges to spice up your day. Stepping out of comfort zone helps creativity.

4. Learn new things: broaden your knowledge with unfamiliar topics, new ideas and connections will appear.

5. Talk with your peers: a fresh take on your ideas can make them even better. Share your projects and intuitions with co-workers, friends, family, strangers… and ask for feedback.

6. Search for inspiration in the bests: take a look at your role models. How did they find their brilliant ideas? What are they lacking/have not accomplished that you could possibly come up with?

7. Use creative tools: like lists, mind maps or brainstorming, to help the creative process.

8. Stop criticising yourself: lower your expectations and accept that sometimes creativity can be blocked. Be kind with yourself.